Then And Now: Musemage And vReveal

Musemage 1.9.1

This software was introduced to us by AMD as a recently-optimized example of an application able to benefit from OpenCL. We used it in the aforementioned Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition review a couple of months back and are revisiting it today.

Interestingly, Intel's architectural advantage means that its hardware is generally faster than AMD's when we test the conversion of a JPEG into an HDR image. Enabling OpenCL support on the A8 allows it to catch the Pentium. So, in this title at least, OpenCL is being used to attain parity with Sandy Bridge. Without the benefit of hardware acceleration, Llano clearly takes longer to complete the task.

We tried the app's internal benchmark, but didn't observe gains attributable to OpenCL. Our real-world test is more meaningful anyway, we think.

MotionDSP vReveal 3.2.0

vReveal is a video enhancement application designed to stabilize shaky clips, clean excessive noise, fix color levels to make video look more natural, and create panoramas out of panning shots.

The software jumps from 8 FPS to 17 FPS with OpenCL support turned on when we update from last year's version 2.0 to the 3.2.0 build available today. Obviously, that's a significant step. However, we discovered other differences as well that cause the latest version to run slower than the old one. This applies to both systems; AMD's A8 and Intel's Pentium both run slower.